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8.1.14

Google in Style

Good literature is not just about great
ideas, good stories, dramatic situations interlaced with well developed
thoughts and reflections. Literature is also about a writer-specific
form, the specific style of how to say things. And this is what makes
writers so unique and recognizable. You quickly can tell if a text which
deals with a train ride through south-eastern Europe is by Thomas
Pynchon, or Agatha Christie or Joseph Roth. Similarily, despite many
novels and short stories are located in San Francisco, you will quickly
recognise which one is a Raymond Chandler, because of his special style
of writing: sober, precise, and very illustrative, with a certain
distance to his characters, and by leaving any judgement to the reader.
Bad literature can be easily identified by the absence of style, or by
the adoption of a very uniform style. A bad example are the Scandinavian
crime stories which saw an inflation on the book discounts and the best
seller lists. I guess they all follow the blood trace of the ordinary
readers appetite for explicit described cruelity, for their suspicion
that behind a seemingly harmonic society must be the worst degree of
murder and slaughter-house sensation, and that after 5 p.m. every office
clerk turns into a zombie or a werwolf, hunting for young flesh. Most
of these crime novels also fuel the stereotype that moral values in the
society are maintained only by a small, usually female minority.

If I open a book of this genre, I don’t
recognise a style difference, whether its is by Adler Olsen, Stig
Larsson, Henning Mankell or others of this school. Their style is simply
indistinguishable, and therefore no style at all. The form is like
Ikea, for a quick and cheap consumption to fill some empty time with
some easy to get sensation.

There is, thanks god, much better
literature coming from Ikea land, and one of the finest examples is Lars
Gustafsson. He is not only a brilliant narrator, a great magician of
merging reality, utopia, and philosophic reflections, but in addition he
is a great stylist. After reading one of his novels, whether the plot
is situated in Swedens Västmanland county, or in an Italian castle, or
in a Berlin villa or a students dorm in Austin/Texas, you have the good
chance to recognise any other of Gustafssons euvre. And this not because
any names of the acting characters re-appear in the next book, a cheap
trick used by the notorius Swedish crime writers in a helpless attempt
to make their mass-production sequel books recognisable, by telling us
again and again about the adventures of Wallander or Lisbeth Salander.

Lars Gustafsson does not need such a
cheap trick to make his literature unique and recognisable. And how
resilient Gustafssons style is I recognised only recently, when in
complete ignorance of his Swedish mother tongue dared to translate two
unpublished texts, assuming they were of his authorship, by using
Googles translate function. The first text I received by e-mail, signed
by Mr. Gustafsson personaly and carrying his e-mail address, one that my
mail program properperly recognised because we had exchanged some
correspondence before. What surprised me was that suddenly Gustafsson
wrote to me in Swedish, maybe he wanted to challenge my promise from
some years ago to learn the language in order to read his next books
before they are translated by the publisher. But of course, I did not
made much progress, and instead I quickly copy/pasted the whole message
into Google Translate, and within a second or two, I could read a cry
for help, explaining that Lars Gustafsson got pickpocket in London and
without any cash or credit card left, has to sleep rough for the next
night unless he can buy a ticket home, for which he asks me for some
financial support. At this moment, I did not paid too much attention to
the writing style of the message, first assuming that even a great
literature stylist as Lars Gustafsson might not use his full talent at
each and every short communication, and secondly, at least at this
stage, I did not trusted a computer generated text translation to
preserve a writing style. But this notion I had to revise short after.
But what confused me a bit was that I received this emergency e-mail,
supposedly from Lars Gustafsson, right at a weekend when Munich was
hosting a three-days series of Skandinavian literature and poetry, with
Mr. Gustafsson beeing scheduled to read from his books and poems on the
first and the last day. When I called the organizers to investigate how
Mr. Gustafsson could quickly be brought to Munich, to my surpise they
could ensure me that he has already arrived in town some days ago, on a
regular flight from Stockholm. So apparently, he never had been
pick-pocketed in London, and the emergency mail was a fake one produced
by some internet criminals to raise money from people they identified
after hacking Mr. Gustafssons address list.

The week after hearing him reading some
of his poems and essays in Munich, I had a look at his internet blog,
curious to see if he already wrote something about his visit to Munich
and this fictious London crime with him as the robbed victim. Everything
new I found there was a text by Mr. Gustafsson recalling a former visit
to Portugal. The few words I could decipher from the Swedish text were
“globalisation”, “tourism”, “Fernando Pessoa” and
“Baixa Alta”. To get at least some ideas what Lars Gustafssons relation
to Portugal are, I again used Google to translate his blog post from
Swedish to German. And within some milliseconds, I was reading a typical
Gustafsson essay, in this incoparable style of linking some marginal
observations of a daily life with deep philosophical reflections,
sentences void of any didactic selfsufficiency, but entertaining and
inspiring for the reader. And this very unique, recognisable style made
it almost undamaged through a computerized transformation, so that the
text finally was not much worse than one translated by a professional
translator of the publisher.

It is hard to tell, of course, if Google
is realy so sophisticated that it can adequately translate any personal
text to other languages and maintain the personal flavor, or if it is
mainly the powerful style of Mr. Gustafssons language that makes his
text so resilient to a computerized conversion. In this case, for sure, I
could clearly tell which text was a real Gustafsson, and which one was a
fake using his stolen e-mail address.

In maybe not too far a future there will
be a new Google program, not to translate texts from one language to
another, but from one style to another. So one could than take a text
from an instruction manual and convert it into a Lars Gustafsson style
instruction manual. Would this be an adequate essay, fiction or
non-fiction ? For sure not, because style without ideas is still no
literature, not a penny better than all the cheap best seller with their
action-plots so hastily cobbled together. Good literature needs both,
clear, crisp ideas to develop, wrapped into a great style. And Lars
Gustafsson is one of the few modern authors who is a master of this
skill, and there is no Google program in sight to replace this talent.